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Guest column: Many pluses to open enrollment proposal

In its purest sense, open enrollment means that school boundaries are lifted and everyone applies to go to a school or schools.

Students who live in the former attendance area or in a specified geographic catchment area and who apply to the school that would have been their neighborhood school get first preferences in the lottery for all seats up to the capacity of a building.

As I understand it, this does not seem to be what Duval Superintendent Nikolai Vitti is proposing to do.

Vitti is proposing a repackaging of the special transfer option program that has been available to students for many years.

The application season for special transfer option takes place after the magnet applications are in and there is a specified and published deadline and a lottery is conducted to fill available seats in non magnet schools.

All of this has been on the www.duvalchoice.com website for years.

Each year 7,000 to 8,000 students participate in this type of transfer from their neighborhood school to another Duval public school.

MAJOR DIFFERENCES

Here are the major differences I see between the special transfer option and Vitti’s open enrollment:

■ All schools that are under capacity are being required to participate and open seats for students from outside the attendance area for the transfer lottery.

In the past, it was up to the principal whether to open seats even if the school was operating below capacity. It was not unusual for a school to be at 60 percent or 70 percent utilization and not have open seats for the special transfer option lottery.

■ All schools are responsible for marketing themselves. And it is now the principal’s responsibility to do so. In the past, there was a “lead teacher” who received a supplement for developing and executing a marketing and recruitment plan for the school. Lead teachers were trained by the School Choice staff in after-school group sessions known as “Magnet College” and then later by “Choice College.”

■ All schools will now have special programs to offer to parents as enticements to come to their schools. I believe these special programs are intended to follow the geographic feeder patterns.

This is similar to the magnet operation where similar themes are offered at elementary, middle school and high school, thus allowing students to progress from one grade level configuration to the next in the same thematic program.

The advantages to what Vitti is proposing are the following in my opinion:

■ It will cause all schools to get in the game. Everyone becomes responsible for “selling” their school and its offerings. Parents will vote with their feet and send their children to schools that offer something that is of interest to their child (much like magnets currently do).

■ It will make all schools more parent-friendly. No longer will schools have a “captive audience” consisting of students who live in the boundary area.

■ It will begin to eliminate the myth — or complaint — that magnet and charter schools take all of the good students and school leaders. It will be everyone’s responsibility to create and offer the best possible educational program.

■ Competition makes every school better.

CAVEATS TO WATCH OUT FOR:

■ Will schools be given the necessary resources to support the new or special programs that will be offered to attract students?

During my tenure as executive director of School Choice, we were sometimes criticized for offering “storefront” magnets.

Every year funding was an issue, and keeping the many magnet programs viable was always a challenge. Special programs require special materials, equipment and in many cases ongoing teacher training (such as Montessori) or teachers with specialized skills (such as dance, strings, native speakers of a different language).

■ Transportation — or the lack of it — will reduce the number of children who may want to attend a different school but have no way to get there if the parent is unable to transport.

This is the same concern I had when transportation to seven dedicated magnet schools was eliminated years ago as a budget reduction strategy.

Thankfully, one of the first major changes Vitti made was to reinstate transportation to those schools.

Otherwise, those schools, many of which are considered Duval’s “premier” schools, would have become over time much like private schools — catering to more affluent students whose parents could afford to create their own self-pay system of transportation.

Sally Hague retired last year as an administrator in the Duval public schools in charge of assigning students to magnet schools and overseeing charter schools.